• Progress Reports Underway: I am done with assessments and have started writing their reports! I’m half-way through and it’s been amazing to look back on their incredible learning journeys.  What a privilege it is to teach your children!
• Child-led Spring Conferences: Click here for the Sign up genius for June!
• Memorial Day: NO SCHOOL Monday May 29th
• Sub for Kate: Wednesday May 31st
• Box City: It’s during Conference Week this year, June 5-9th. Start collecting large cardboard boxes to bring in for your child and others! One per child has worked in the past. Please contact Christine G. for questions at cch722 (at) gmail.com.
• Community Snack Schedule:  This week is the Wayne family. Please use the snack signup genius here to sign up for a week to bring snack. Let the Snack Coordinator,
  

  Sheila is teaching kids to sew pillows and other items on Thursdays!

  Kudsana (kkizaraly@yahoo.com), know if you need special accommodations or are unable to fulfill your commitment. And a BIG thank you to the Ramam family for snack last week!

• APPLY SUNSCREEN: Please make sure your child is protected and prepared for sunny weather! We have a sunscreen basket under the morning message. Feel free to drop in the kind you like and shoot me an email saying I can use it on your child. Thanks!
• LAST Parent Meeting Date:  Wednesday June 14th.
• Whole-Kinder Pod Hike: Monday June 19th – We will go on a nature hike behind the school. Technically it’s a field trip, so you’ll be hearing from Arielle!
• Whole Kinder-Pod Water Exploration Celebration: Wednesday June 21, Victoria Tran (Joan’s coordinator) will email details soon.
• ADULTS-ONLY End of the Year Party: Saturday June 24, 12-6pm at 1257 Lakeside
  

  Join us on Saturday 6/24 at our pool to celebrate a great year!

  Drive, Sunnyvale CA 94085. Please join me at my complex for an end of the year pool party/BBQ potluck. Free parking in the garage, but I recommend carpooling. We have a grill, a pool, good music and a cabana! Feel free to bring a yummy dish or drinks and DEFINITELY a bathing suit 🙂 Adam and I have rented the cabana adjacent to our pool, and are looking forward to hosting you for some fun in the sun to celebrate all your hard work this year! Let’s party like it’s 1999!

• Kindergarten Closing Ceremonies: Friday, June 23, 11:30-1:10pm. We’ve had 
  great year of goal-setting and reaching since we began our Olympic Brain & Body Goal Wall! Now, it’s almost time for the Kinder Academic Games of 2016-2017 to end 🙂 Parents, please join us in class on the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL for the Special Kindergarten Closing Ceremonies for Room 7. We’ll celebrate our accomplishments, together, parade around the school passing around “the goal torch” and have a nice potluck! More details to come.
• Enrichments/Coordinators for FIRST GRADE: Think about what enrichments or
  

  Help remind your little ones of what’s expected with our new equipment!

  classroom jobs you may want to take on for first grade. I would like to start making plans for curriculum with those volunteers for next year. For definitions of the roles below visit https://discoverykinderworld.wordpress.com/classroom-coordinator-info/:

  1. Classroom Coordinator-
  2. Field Trip Coordinator -Arielle Kurtze (taken)
  3. Class Librarian/Scholastic Coordinator –
  4. Social Events Coordinator – Jennifer Coscarart (taken)
  5. Documentation Parent – (THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT! A Weekly/Monthly job)
  6. Science – Christine Ging, _______________
  7. Cooking –  
  8. Arts & Crafts –
  9. Gardening  –

Weekly Highlights!

• Project: Fairy House Building/Decorating
  

  NEW line up system!

• Box City: We continued conversations about Box City (coming up in two weeks!)
• Fairies Still Visit: They were sky camping this week, so they only visited us on Thursday when they returned!
• Trouble in Line-Up Paradise: We were having issues traveling to and from the playground. So, we had a few meetings and came up with a line-up strategy that worked so far – the buddy system! This will make a huge difference in eliminating power struggles to be near the front, shoving, cutting, etc.  We line up the same way, every time, holding hands.
• Community Talks: We discussed several agenda items, timed 7 minutes each. Whatever we didn’t finish, we left for the net day. Some of the topics were making playground toy agreements, talking about taking better care of the materials around the room, and socio-emotional issues that came up about people not treating one another with kindness in words or actions.
• Skill Shares: Logan (math facts) and Henry (gymnastics)
  

  Identifying shape names, matching them up, and writing how many sides each has.

• Literacy: Writing observations of veggies after being soaked in the colored water, Story Workshop, and letter writing to fairies.
• Math: Talking about shapes, their characteristics, and the difference between 2D (flat – height and width) and 3D shapes (height, width and DEPTH)
• Science: We continued experiments with osmosis using colored water vegetables!!!
• Just-Right Reading! Each morning, parents can help kids choose leveled books totake home and practice reading with children. Please be sure to return the books and put them in the proper bins!
• Filling Buckets and Taking Names! We read the books Have You Filled A Bucket Today? and How Full Is Your Bucket? which both helped to facilitate the continuation of a conversation we started during our Community Talk. We did an activity called BUGS & WISHES, where students said what bugged them (annoyed them) and what they wish would happen instead. MANY people had issues with friends being unkind or saying mean things. So, I introduced my classroom community bucket and said that they could write a drop for every nice deed they did or kind word they said in our classroom. “When the bucket is full, that means our community is stronger, now. We feel better, more confident, more supported by our friends. You will also earn an extra 10 minutes of exploration every time it is filled.” A few kids only heard that last part and quickly tried to fill the bucket with silly reasons! However, most of them took this seriously and together we filled our bucket 3x in one week. They were so proud of their efforts and happily recognized bucket filling moments when they could lift someone up, telling me or another adult. They also articulated when they felt others were DIPPING into their buckets, or “dumping them.” We talked about how no one can dump it, because we’re in charge of holding onto our imaginary buckets. No one else has that power.

Lemonade Stand Budget: Update!

So far, we spent money on the things they originally came up with plus a ball cart, because as Nakiya said, “You should just buy the ball cart from the picture we used for the agreements (to which everyone voted and agreed)!!!! Because we can’t use the lunch cart forever. That’s just a temporary solution.”  Our ball cart arrived Wednesday, and with Mercedes’s help and some dedicated Kindergarten assistants, the ball cart was successfully assembled on Thursday!

I made a little slideshow of visuals based on our conversations, so far, to further discuss our plan with the remaining amount.  They discussed how much we should allocate to various funds with what was left of our budget. Maddie K. and a few others asked us to save some of it in case anything breaks and we have to replace it (i.e. a saving cushion). Henry suggested we donate some of it to the homeless, because “You can’t really buy a ball or
anything for 16 cents, so we could give that to people who need it.” Others jumped in saying we could essentially set aside $20 and give it to the food bank we visited earlier this year (Second Harvest). So, we looked at what we had left and thought about how much should be saved, spent, and donated to a good cause (helping the poor).

We conducted A LOT of votes! Children had suggestions and asked questions. They talked to one another and then reconvened. There was even a little lobbying going on, though they didn’t know that’s what they were doing 🙂 Eventually, we came upon an agreement. Turns out, we have a class of savers and philanthropists! There was actually an argument about why we might not want to save 50% and GIVE 50% to the poor – it was quite touching. In the end, they agreed to save 50% for savings (in case things break and need to be replaced), 20% to the homeless (Second Harvest), and 30% for spending on more equipment.  We talked about what other possible toys we would want and this coming week, we will follow up on our wish list!

Note for Parents: I appreciate you letting the kids figure out how to solve their problem with the lack of access to P.E. equipment. Many parents have asked if they can bring in balls or other toys and I asked before that we hold off. NOW, YOU CAN BRING THEM! Donations are greatly appreciated 🙂 Thank you for waiting!

We’re still going full-force with our study on osmosis and diffusion.  

VEGETABLES AND COLORED WATER

Dissection: The inside of the veggie was NOT dyed!

Because this experiment was so similar to the one we conducted last week, we took this opportunity to explain best practices when conducting scientific experiments.   We talked about how scientists had to follow specific step-by-step procedures when doing their experiments to ensure that results were accurate and repeatable.

While they were preparing their cups of colored water and vegetables, we asked the kids to make hypotheses about what would happen to the vegetables the next day:

Building on our vegetable experiments, we set up a side experiment looking at how salt water affected live plants.  We had two plants – one that the kids would water with salt water and one that the kids would water with fresh water.  Thanks to Julie Olsen (Gardening Enrichment) for providing the bean plants for this activity!

Box City – Creative Learning Zone

This year, the staff requested that the intent of Box City be on community building – encouraging students to think beyond their own businesses and look at ways to make the overall community more positive and enriching for all the citizens.

One issue that has been brought up in the past is addressing the needs of the low-income citizen (aka kids who don’t have successful businesses and run out of bucks early in the game).  In the past, these citizens could earn bucks by doing civil jobs such as collecting trash.  These jobs didn’t provide the same sense of pride and ownership as running a successful business.  For some, it had the opposite effect.  Students said that civil jobs were “embarrassing”, “demeaning”, and “boring”.

Under the guidance of their first-grade teacher, the kids in Room 12 set to tackle this issue and decided to set up a “no-bucks required zone” for the citizens of Box City.

Room 12 is planning the specifics of this open-to-all citizen section of Box City.  It will include communal building challenges.  Room 12 students will also be manning free activities in the dirt area around the playground.

This zone is located in the playground area, including the hockey rink.

We talked briefly about the no-bucks-required zone to get Room 7’s initial feedback and ideas for what they would want to see in there.

• “All kids should be able to go to the free zone, not just kids that don’t have money.  That’s called excluding and discriminating if you only allowed kids with no money to go.”
• “I don’t like the idea of a free area because then nobody would want to buy from my business.  They would just get stuff for free.  It’s not fair for me.”
• Many wanted to convert the hockey area into a dedicated space for kids to invent cardboard-based sport (“We could do cardboard hockey.”  “Or basketball!”  “Or soccer!”  “Or golf!”)
• “Maybe kids can get some bucks if they play one of the cardboard sport games.  Or maybe they can get a prize.”

We passed this feedback to Room 12!

Children’s Read-Aloud Schedule!

After hearing Ellie Luz read last month, many other children felt inspired to read to the

Tyler’s read-aloud!

class, too. They begged me to create a sign-up and kept asking when they would read! So, we took time to create this list, below. They chose where on the list they wanted to be (knowing the higher or lower they were meant sooner or later), but please talk with your child about when they’re scheduled to read and whether they’ll be able to prepare their book, in time. This is the list that the kids asked me to put together, because they wanted to read a book to the class themselves. If your child’s goal is to do this, but he/she’s not ready right now, I can definitely have him/her go later! For children who aren’t reading yet but volunteered, too, they could simply do a picture walk (narrating the story orally based on each picture)! The last option is perhaps they can read with a partner, taking turns, or they can read a page and I read a page. The bottom line is that I want them to take as much ownership over this activity as possible 🙂 

What type of book?

Whatever book they want! From BOB books to picture books. It’s their choice of whatever makes them feel comfortable and CONFIDENT.

List of read-aloud dates and students:

1. Ellie  3/23
2. Genevieve 3/24
3. Logan 3/29
4. Dominic 3/30
5. Jada 4/21
6. Claudia 4/27
7. Maddie S./Izzy 5/4 (reschedule?)
8. Nakiya 5/11
9. Pranav 5/12
10. Tyler 5/18
11. Maddie K.  5/18
12. Sthanika 6/1
13. __________ 6/2
14. Sadie 6/7
15. Donovan 6/8
16. Quentin 6/9
17. Oscar 6/13
18. Byron 6/14
19. Nadia 6/15
20. Cameron 6/16
21. __________ 6/20
22. __________ 6/22

Opted Out (for now?)

Henry

Steele

Nicholas

Friday Skill Sharing Schedule (9:15ish-9:50am)

Children will have an opportunity to explain, demonstrate and field question/comments

Logan shared his math facts about multiplication, explaining repeated addition, and demonstrating 3-digit addition!

on ONE (1) skill of their choice. Some have to decide WHICH SKILL because they thought of two. Those children have an (*) next to their name. They have 5-10 minutes each. You can discuss with them how they may want to show their skill, what props they might need, how they will utilize the space of our classroom safely, and help them prepare for this public speaking opportunity by rehearsing it with them. I will prepare the children to be encouraging, kind, and respectful audience members. Some children already told me what they chose as a skill. So that’s why some names already have a skill in parenthesis. If your child has not chosen a skill, yet, please help them choose and prepare before their debut! Please see the following sign-ups, this week’s in bold:

• March 31: Cici (Flexibility), Genevieve (Art)
• April 21: Byron (Karate) and Nadia (Cat’s cradle)
• April 28: Tyler (Dance moves), Ellie (Drawing), Maddie K (Gymnastics)
• May 5: Donovan (Hockey), Pranav (Art), 
• May 12:  Dominic (Basketball), Oscar (T-Ball) and Jada (Gymnastics)
• May 26: Logan (?) and Henry (Gymnastics)
• June 2: Cameron (Gymnastics), Sthanika (_________) and , Maddie S. (Gymnastics)
• June 9: Nakiya (Teaching Reading) and Nicholas (_______), Steele (Protecting)
• June 16: Quentin (Running) and Sadie (Dance moves)

Henry shares his gymnastic skills and taught us how to do a favorite move!

• Kindergarten Closing Ceremonies: Friday, June 23, 11:30-1:10pm. We’ve had a
  

  Help remind your little ones what’s expected with their new equipment!

  great year of goal-setting and reaching since we began our Olympic Brain & Body Goal Wall! Now, it’s almost time for the Kinder Academic Games of 2016-2017 to end 🙂 Parents, please join us in class on the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL for the Special Kindergarten Closing Ceremonies for Room 7. We’ll celebrate our accomplishments, together, parade around the school passing around “the goal torch” and have a nice potluck! More details to come.

• Child-led Spring Conferences: Click here for the Sign up genius for June!
• End of Year Assessments: I am doing assessments during the day (Quiet Time and Exploration). My hope was that doing it during the day would save you scheduling 2 days to come in with your child, as opposed to 1. 
• Box City: It’s during Conference Week this year, June 5-9th. Start collecting large cardboard boxes to bring in for your child and others! One per child has worked in the past. Please contact Christine G. for questions at cch722 (at) gmail.com.
  

  Thank you Wendy, Tyler’s mom, for helping us get our first round of items for Monday!

• Community Snack Schedule:  This week is the Ramam family. Please use the snack signup genius here to sign up for a week to bring snack. Let the Snack Coordinator,
  Kudsana (kkizaraly@yahoo.com), know if you need special accommodations or are unable to fulfill your commitment. And a BIG thank you to the Olsen family for snack last week!
• APPLY SUNSCREEN: Please make sure your child is protected and prepared for sunny weather! We have a sunscreen basket under the morning message. Feel free to drop in the kind you like and shoot me an email saying I can use it on your child. Thanks!
• Staff Development Day: NO SCHOOL Friday May 19
• Memorial Day: NO SCHOOL Monday May 29th
• Other FUTURE Parent Meeting Dates: Wednesday May 24th, and Wednesday June 14th.

Weekly Highlights!

• D2 In-Service Day: No School Friday May 19
  

  Kid-Read Aloud: Tyler read an excerpt from Calvin and Hobbes!

• Sub for Kate: Wednesday (Lonnell) and Thursday (Shalini)
• Art: Popsicle stick fairies (to go in the houses!)
• Project: Fair House Building
• Box City: We continued conversations about Box City (coming up in two weeks!)
• Fairies Still Visit!
• Community Talks: We discussed several agenda items , timed 7 minutes each. Whatever we didn’t finish, we left for the net day. Some of the topics were making playground toy agreements, talking about taking better care of the materials around the room, and socio-emotional issues that came up about people not treating one another with kindness in words or actions.
• Children’s Read Aloud: Tyler and Maddie K.!
• Literacy: Every child wrote his/her wish list for items to buy for the playground
  

  Thanks for subbing Lonnell and Shalini!

  equipment.

• Science: We continued experiments with osmosis using salt water, gummy bears, gak, and now vegetables!!!
• Just-Right Reading! Each morning, parents can help kids choose leveled books totake home and practice reading with children. Please be sure to return the books and put them in the proper bins!
• Focus Spots: The lack of listening and responding during group times merited spots around the room. Children came to me and asked for a focus spot if they exhausted other strategies. Now, everyone has one taped to the floor!

Lemonade Stand Budget: Update!

To-do next week!

Due to my unexpected absence, I wasn’t able to discuss this with them in length the information from the picture on the left. However, I made a little slideshow of visuals based on their conversations, so far, to further discuss our plan.  They discussed agreements for the new equipment and Logan helped me make the visuals to accompany them, because students noted “Some kids can’t read the words, yet!”

Next week, we will talk about what we will do with what is left of our budget. Students did talk a little bit about ways to spend the money, though. Maddie K. and a few others asked us to save some of it in case anything breaks and we have to replace it (i.e. a saving cushion). Henry suggested we donate some of it to the homeless, because “You can’t really buy a ball or anything for 16 cents, so we could give that to people who need it.” Others jumped in saying we could essentially set aside $20 and give it to the food bank we visited earlier this year (Second Harvest).

To-do next week!

While I was gone, I had Shalini give the students a “wish list” literacy activity to complete. We will use those to discuss what we will buy with our left over budget, during the next community talk. So far, we spent money on the things they originally came up with plus a ball cart, because as Nakiya said, “You should just buy the ball cart from the picture we used for the agreements (to which everyone voted and agreed)!!!! Because we can’t use the lunch cart forever. That’s just a temporary solution.”

Science:  Gummy Bear Osmosis Experiments Continue!

This week, we continued exploring concepts of osmosis, looking at how salt affects the movement of water!  The kids did a number of guided experiments, and had a chance to practice making hypotheses and comparing their results against a Control (the ‘thing’ in the experiment that you didn’t change)

 

Activity #1: Gummy Bears with Salt Water

A couple of weeks ago, the kids had a chance to see what happened when a gummy bear was immersed in water for a day.  They also had a chance to conduct their own gummy bear experiments.

Oscar wanted to see what happened when we added salt water to his gummy bear. I don’t know if he kept the experiment going long enough to see what happened, but I figured that testing salt’s effect on gummy bears was a good experiment for the whole class to try.  The kids prepped the gummy bears the day before by filling their cups with water, adding two spoonfuls of salt, mixing the water solution, and then dropped a gummy bear into the cup.

Christine asked the kids to give a hypothesis of what they thought would happen with the salty gummy bears.  Some of the responses:

• It’ll maybe get bigger, then get smaller, but then maybe get bigger again.
• It’ll taste salty.
• It’ll get smushier.
• It’ll get harder.
• It’ll sink.  But I don’t know if it’ll still be sinking tomorrow.
• The same as {previous child}
• It’ll fall apart.

The next morning we checked them, comparing the salty gummy bears to a Control gummy bear (the gummy bear which we didn’t do anything to it).  The kids made verbal observations:

• It’s a little bit bigger, and it’s puffier.  Like stickier.
• It’s got some white stuff inside it.  I think it’s the salt.
• One side is white – that’s the side where the salt was.
• I can squish it and it only breaks a little bit, it’s not too delicate.
• I can still see the “A” on it (the original gummy bear has the letter “A” molded on its belly)
• It feels slimey.

Honestly, the fact that the gummy bear was larger than the control was unexpected, as we’d assumed that the size of the gummy bears would stay the same due to the high concentration of salt in the water.  Science surprises us all!

The kids then had a chance to try the gummy bear.  Most took a bite and spit it out a few seconds later – “it’s super salty!  Where did the sugar go?”  “The salt went inside the gummy bear!”

Activity #2: Gak with Salt Water

This is actually an experiment that we’ve done before, but, because we’re revisiting how salt affects the movement of water through barriers, we thought it might be good to repeat it again in a more controlled manner.  The kids each received a ziploc baggie with a small amount of gak in it.  After making a hypothesis, they added a spoonful or two of salt, closed the bag, and observed.  Almost immediately, they noticed the gak changing.

“There’s water coming out!”

“My gak is starting to get lumpy together.”

“The gak is turning white.  I think the salt is going onto it and making it white.”

The kids discovered that even more water had been released out of the gak after letting the gak sit for 30 minutes.  “The water that was inside the gak is going outside to be with the salt!”

Activity #3: Veggies with Salt Water

To continue our exploration on osmosis and salt, we looked at how salt water affected vegetables.  The kids each got their own cup to fill with carrots, celery, and raw potatoes.  They then added salt water to their cups and left the cups overnight.  (We forgot to ask for hypotheses!  Oops!)

The next day, the kids got to make observations, comparing the salty veggies with Control veggies (veggies soaked in plain water).  Some notes:

• All the veggies in the salt water are more soft and bendy than the ones in plain water.
• The potatoes in salt water are more brown and bumpy than the ones in normal water.
• The veggies in the salt water taste salty and no one wants to eat them.
• The veggies in the salt water got smaller.
• The celery in the salt water feels fluffy.  The celery in normal water feels hard.
• The salt water veggies are the best!
• Sat water veggies are bendable.

We think the kids really enjoyed seeing how different things were affected by salt water and practicing the art of observing against a Control in an experiment.  Next time we’ll be exporing diffusion and osmosis of colored water!

Box City: Discussing Economics and Bucks

We began talking about Box City a week ago. The conversation was more around what makes a city and then what makes a community. As we discussed how to plan and run a business with the lemonade stand last week, this inspired many children to think about their own Box City ideas for a business, this week. Maddie K asked, “Can we make a book store? We can make books like we do at Quiet Time and sell them at our store at Box City!”

This week, kids are preparing for Box City week (June 5-9)!  For parents unfamiliar with Box City, “Box City bucks” (wood sample pieces) are given to the students on the 2nd day of Box City week.  These pieces represent the money in Box City, and students have the opportunity to use them to buy/sell items/services from each other’s businesses.  The discussion we had Tuesday morning focused on three different Box City scenarios that reflect actual economic/social situations in the real world:

1.  A child losing their bucks.  Should they be able to get replacement bucks or do they have to deal with the loss?  [This scenario pertains to the concept of insurance.]

– pick up trash (6 votes)

– open your shop and sell things

– teacher should give replacement bucks (5 votes)

– ask a friend for a loan

2.  A child providing a carnival game for free because they wanted to do something nice for the community.  Should they be able to get bucks from the teacher for their contribution or will they have to accept that they will not get income? [This scenario pertains to the concept of gvt grants]

– yes, they should get some reward for helping the community (6 votes)

– no, they don’t get money (8 votes)

– they can accept donations

– one child said she would set up a tip jar and donate the tips to kids doing nice/free things

3.  A child having an excessive amount of bucks and seeing those around them with no bucks [This scenario pertains to the concept of charity/donations]

– the child should share their bucks (12 votes)

– the child should see if the others want to work together with her

– the child should keep all their bucks (1 vote)

It was an interesting and informative discussion!

Children’s Read-Aloud Schedule!

After hearing Ellie Luz read last month, many other children felt inspired to read to the

Tyler’s read-aloud!

class, too. They begged me to create a sign-up and kept asking when they would read! So, we took time to create this list, below. They chose where on the list they wanted to be (knowing the higher or lower they were meant sooner or later), but please talk with your child about when they’re scheduled to read and whether they’ll be able to prepare their book, in time. This is the list that the kids asked me to put together, because they wanted to read a book to the class themselves. If your child’s goal is to do this, but he/she’s not ready right now, I can definitely have him/her go later! For children who aren’t reading yet but volunteered, too, they could simply do a picture walk (narrating the story orally based on each picture)! The last option is perhaps they can read with a partner, taking turns, or they can read a page and I read a page. The bottom line is that I want them to take as much ownership over this activity as possible 🙂 

What type of book?

Whatever book they want! From BOB books to picture books. It’s their choice of whatever makes them feel comfortable and CONFIDENT.

List of read-aloud dates and students:

1. Ellie  3/23
   

   Maddie K. reads aloud spontaneously!

2. Genevieve 3/24
3. Logan 3/29
4. Dominic 3/30
5. Jada 4/21
6. Claudia 4/27
7. Maddie S./Izzy 5/4 (reschedule?)
8. Nakiya 5/11
9. Pranav 5/12
10. Tyler 5/18
11. Maddie K.  6/1
12. Sthanika 6/2
13. Sadie 6/7
14. Donovan 6/8
15. Quentin 6/9
16. Oscar 6/13
17. Byron 6/14
18. Nadia 6/15
19. Cameron 6/16

Opted Out (for now?)

Henry

Steele

Nicholas

Friday Skill Sharing Schedule (9:15ish-9:50am)

Pranav shared his art two weeks ago!

Children will have an opportunity to explain, demonstrate and field question/comments on ONE (1) skill of their choice. Some have to decide WHICH SKILL because they thought of two. Those children have an (*) next to their name. They have 5-10 minutes each. You can discuss with them how they may want to show their skill, what props they might need, how they will utilize the space of our classroom safely, and help them prepare for this public speaking opportunity by rehearsing it with them. I will prepare the children to be encouraging, kind, and respectful audience members. Some children already told me what they chose as a skill. So that’s why some names already have a skill in parenthesis. If your child has not chosen a skill, yet, please help them choose and prepare before their debut! Please see the following sign-ups, this week’s in bold:

• March 31: Cici (Flexibility), Genevieve (Art)
  

  Donovan shared his hockey skills two weeks ago!

• April 21: Byron (Karate) and Nadia (Cat’s cradle)
• April 28: Tyler (Dance moves), Ellie (Drawing), Maddie K (Gymnastics)
• May 5: Donovan (Hockey), Pranav (Art), 
• May 12:  Dominic (Basketball), Oscar (T-Ball) and Jada (Gymnastics)
• May 26: Logan (?) and Henry (Gymnastics)
• June 2: Cameron (Gymnastics), Sthanika (_________) and , Maddie S. (Gymnastics)
• June 9: Nakiya (Teaching Reading) and Nicholas (_______), Steele (Protecting)
• June 16: Quentin (Running) and Sadie (Dance moves)

• Kindergarten Closing Ceremonies: Friday, June 23, 11:30-1:10pm. We’ve had a
  

  Lemonade Stand: We turned a total profit of $366.16!

  great year of goal-setting and reaching since we began our Olympic Brain & Body Goal Wall! Now, it’s almost time for the Kinder Academic Games of 2016-2017 to end 🙂 Parents, please join us in class on the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL for the Special Kindergarten Closing Ceremonies for Room 7. We’ll celebrate our accomplishments, together, parade around the school passing around “the goal torch” and have a nice potluck! More details to come.

• Child-led Spring Conferences: Click here for the Sign up genius for June!
• End of Year Assessments: I am doing assessments during the day (Quiet Time and Exploration). My hope was that doing it during the day would save you scheduling 2 days to come in with your child, as opposed to 1. 
• Box City: It’s during Conference Week this year, June 5-9th. Start collecting large cardboard boxes to bring in for your child and others! One per child has worked in the past. Please contact Christine G. for questions at cch722 (at) gmail.com.
  

  Students decided what important info needed to be on the lemonade stand posters and fliers

• Community Snack Schedule:  This week is the Olsen family. Please use the snack signup genius here to sign up for a week to bring snack. Let the Snack Coordinator,
  Kudsana (kkizaraly@yahoo.com), know if you need special accommodations or are unable to fulfill your commitment. And a BIG thank you to the Ho/Fukuhara family for snack last week!
• APPLY SUNSCREEN: Please make sure your child is protected and prepared for sunny weather! We have a sunscreen basket under the morning message. Feel free to drop in the kind you like and shoot me an email saying I can use it on your child. Thanks!
• Staff Development Day: NO SCHOOL Friday May 19
• Memorial Day: NO SCHOOL Monday May 29th
• Other FUTURE Parent Meeting Dates: Wednesday May 24th, and Wednesday June 14th.

Fairy Notes: Esmeralda wrote to us this time!

Weekly Highlights!

• Happy Mother’s Day: You ladies are fierce, strong, and amazing women who
  

  Happy Mother’s Day from Spanish Club!

  participate actively in the classroom and your children’s learning. Thank you for ALL you do and we hope you like your special mother’s day gift 🙂

• Art: Making frames for kids’ pictures to give as presents for Mother’s Day!
• Lemonade Stand: Kids learned how to get what they want by working hard and having fun! We started and finished our lemonade stand together to raise money for Kindergarten playground equipment after Coach David said we weren’t allowed to use his, anymore, because we were responsible in taking care of it. We wanted to buy our own to practice being responsible and earn back our privileges.  Students learned how to plan, execute, and run a successful business from start to finish. They worked HARD, earning a total of $366.16 over 4 days!
• Box City: We started conversations about Box City. What is a city? What does it have inside it? What is a community? What does it feel like to be part of a community? We discussed ways that we’d like to focus on building a community vs. the previous box city conglomerate of competitive businesses based on the
  

  Box City Meeting

  commodity of “sugary” goods.

• Fairies! Esmeralda, Luna’s sister, visited us! Having these visitors has inspired children to try their hand at practicing sentences, practicing neat handwriting, more spelling, and writing questions 🙂 It’s really revved up our literacy curriculum…Gotta love those fairies!
• Kinder Sing
• Skill Sharing: We share every Friday! Dominic and Jada shared their skills with us  🙂 (Why? Many children have brought in toy items for show-and-tell, which became a materialistic contest. So, we stopped bringing in items and started bringing in SKILLS. Everyone is good at something and this spring is everyone’s time to shine! Take a look at the schedule so far!)
• Math: We brushed up our addition/subtraction skills with money for our lemonade stand! We also talked about supply and demand, daily profit goals, and daily profit averages (the amount of money total divided by the days we sold our lemonade).
  

  Reflection: Students looked back at their portfolios. They put post-its on what they wanted to share during conferences that showed their learning.

• Buddies: They came to our room and helped kids wrap their Mother’s Day presents. Then, they played together!
• Literacy: We played literacy games, did fairy letter writing, handwriting with lemonade posters and fliers, and self-assessments.
• Science: We continued experiments with gummy bears on osmosis!
• Just-Right Reading! Each morning, parents can help kids choose leveled books totake home and practice reading with children. Please be sure to return the books and put them in the proper bins!
• Focus Spots: The lack of listening and responding during group times merited spots around the room. Children came to me and asked for a focus spot if they exhausted other strategies. Now, everyone has one taped to the floor!

Lemonade Stand: Applying Academic Skills to Real Life!

Context is everything when it comes to learning! We’ve been practicing equations, counting, subtraction, and addition all year. This was the perfect opportunity to put all those skills to use and see just how valuable they are in real life, as well as how much we learned!

Step 1: Community Meetings 

Students wanted to raise money for playground equipment for our pod after they lost P.E. equipment privileges with Coach David’s, due to their lack of responsibility in putting it back after use.  They were upset and needed a way to earn back Coach David’s trust. So, we had a meeting. We talked about the problem and asked kids what we should do. They’ve been wanting to “sell stuff” for months. So, they brainstormed ideas about how we could raise money selling different goods to buy our OWN equipment and learn to practice responsibility using that. We voted and settled on a lemonade stand! Some kids had experience with this, before, and had good suggestions to get us started.

Step 2:  Making a Business Plan

We talked about how we’d get the resources we needed. Parents were our first thought! So, our community pooled together a lemonade stand, cups, lemons, reamers/juicers, sugar, and pitchers. Then, we had to think about the cost of the lemonade. “LET’S CHARGE $20!” some said, “No, $5…or $2.” We had to talk about cost and worth in terms of goods. “If we charge $20 for 1 cup of lemonade…would you buy it? (“No!!!”) Neither would I and I love you to pieces, but I am NOT spending $20 that could get me two burritos at Chipotle on a dinky cup of lemonade!” That quickly brought us down to voting between $1 or $2, and $1 won! We talked about how who our customers would be (the school) and how to get the word out (posters, fliers, word of mouth). Nakiya suggested we have a catchy slogan – so we went with “Cool for a hot day!” They showed their posters to other teachers in the pod to get feedback on the sign and went back to incorporate information they were missing. Students asked me to email the staff to let their classes know, as well. We talked about how long we’d have the stand (four days) and the times we were able to actually run it (2:30-3:30 Tuesday-Friday, except Wednesday which was 1:00-1:30.) They had to think about how to make information about our event CLEAR and  VISIBLE, which meant really talking about what went on the sign.  As several kids pointed out a couple times – “It’s got too much stuff on it!”  and “You can’t read the important things. We can’t have so many drawings everywhere.” and “It’s too busy! Like, we’re not selling hearts guys. We’re selling lemonade!” It also meant walking around the school to find high-traffic spots to post the posters and seeing if we could notice them easily from various access points (corridors, the gate, the quad, etc.).

Putting up our poster in front of the cafeteria!

Step 3: Learning About Company Production

Arielle started us off on our juicing process during cooking on Monday!

Students learned about production (making lemonade) which meant juicing A LOT OF LEMONS! They learned about quality control (making sure we don’t leave good juice filled lemon carcasses), repeatedly using the same recipe steps to mix the lemonade, etc. They saw how much effort it took to make lemon juice and then the steps involved in turning it into a desirable product. THEY took ownership over this process. By the end, they were helping each other juice lemons, reminding them to check the pulp and rinds, straining the juice without help, and making the lemonade recipe, independently. They even invited other students from other classrooms to help and taught them how to successfully participate in the process. Leaders arose during this time and we heard students say things like:

• “If you get tired, just tell someone so they can help you take over.”
  

  We juiced over 200 lemons!

• “We’re almost done, but someone needs to juice this one, again!”
• “That’s a good one Logan, you got all the juice out! Keep going!”
• “If you can’t get all the juice out, give it to someone else to try with a different juicer!”
• “I want to run the lemonade table, can I?”
• “You have to share!”
• “No fighting at the table! If you fight over the juicers you could spill the juice and then all our hard work is ruined.”
• “We have so much lemon juice, because we did teamwork!”
• “Teacher Kate, nobody’s at the lemon juicing table, right now, and if we don’t get enough juice we won’t meet the supply for the demand! Can I ring the chimes and tell people to come over?”
• “Okay, if you want to help – Donovan you can pour 2 cups of water and Steele, you can pour 2 cups of water, because then you each poured two and that’s fair.”
• “If you want to help you have to wash your hands and wait your turn to add ingredients.”
• “Why don’t we have some kids keep making lemonade in the classroom while we’re selling. So, if we run out we have some ready to replace it?”

Step 4: Salesmanship, Advertising, and Money

“Teacher Kate, we want to walk around with a NEW flier for the last day! Can we take a dollar bill so people know how much it is?”

Students talked about what would make THEM buy lemonade and they practiced in our classroom what good customer service looked like: Friendly greeting, asking for an order, giving change, and cuing the “pourer.” We had lots of mini-lessons tucked in there (i.e. remember to smile, cash first – lemonade second, always stay at the cash box, always sanitize your hands, only people working the stand behind the counter, etc.) They were ready! Students decided on how I’d schedule people to work the stand. They wanted it to to be fair and asked me to choose sticks. So, I did and wrote the schedule out for two jobs at a time: cashier and lemonade pourer. The person passing out leis was a job they delegated themselves.

Step 5: Reflection – Community Talks About Successes and Challenges

Supply and demand was one thing. We didn’t make enough for our first day and had to

Students went around the school when the bell rang to get more customers!

turn away paying customers. Also, everyone in our class bought 1 cup of our own lemonade. So, we realized we’d have to forgo drinking it the next day in order for the supply to meet the high demand. We made daily profit goals based on our first two day’s of success and voted on what amount we wanted to earn. Students took our posters around the school and advertised by word of mouth for our lemonade stand. They then realized creating a DELIVERY service was a good idea for people who wanted a cup, but couldn’t leave their desks.

Customers were ‘self-serving’ the lemonade. So, Maddie K. and others made badges for us as a sort of “uniform” 🙂

Additionally, at first, customers were self-serving because they didn’t realize we had a person pouring. Maddie K. was very upset and I asked her what we needed to fix the problem and help them see we work here. She said “Well, they keep pouring for themselves and we can’t do our job- we need a badge or something!” So, I encouraged her to make some and 5 minutes later we had green ‘lemonade’ badges with duct tape on the back.

Below is a video of Donovan telling children how much money we made in two days. He happily stayed after school and counted ALL the money with a little help (but not much!).   He was so proud to reveal what his hard work in calculations amounted to…and the kids were SHOCKED!

Step 6: Community Outreach

Other classrooms hadn’t talked about starting businesses, yet, and so I asked if any of them wanted to go into classrooms and tell kids about our process and get them interested in it. Several kids volunteered to talk to other students (Genevieve, Quentin, Maddie K. and Sadie are featured above) about our business process and explained in our successes, challenges, and fielded questions! Their presentations were NOT planned, but they volunteered and confidently explained everything. The best part? It didn’t matter who I sent over, because they all could have probably explained it 🙂

Room 7 students invited kids from the other class. She gave them a tour of our “facilities” and showed them how to participate in our production process!

Steele is practicing with money -counting by 5s, counting on with new bills, making change, etc.

1. How to get what they want by doing hard work to earn it WHILE having fun!
2. Grade level and above math skills in an applicable context.
3. Useful life skills: Customer service, working in the food industry, cashier work, how to start and run a business, advertising, etc.
4. The power of a community working together for a singular goal.

As their kindergarten teacher, I couldn’t be prouder of their entrepreneurial spirit!

Buddy Time: Mother’s Day Gift Wrapping & Play!

Science:  Gummy Bear Osmosis Experiments Continue!

Activity #1: Gummy Bear Osmosis Skit

Last week, the kids conducted an experiment where gummy bears that were left in water
expanded to 2-3X their size!  Most understood that the gummy bears got bigger, because water somehow moved inside the bear.  To better demonstrate the science of what was happening, the kids had a chance to participate in an interactive skit about osmosis, the movement of water through a membrane! We recreated the story about a poor gummy bear who fell into a cup of water.  The gummy bear’s gelatin structure was represented by a large sheet held up by adults.  “Inside” the gummy bear (behind the sheet) was sugar, represented by small bouncy balls.

The kids represented water molecules.  We explained how water molecules could go back and forth through the gummy bear barrier, but that the sugar molecules could not go through and had to stay inside the bear.  The water molecules kids were asked to look for sugar – which they found inside the gummy bear!  When a few of the kids came outside with their sugar “ball”, we reminded them that the sugar molecule couldn’t go through the gummy bear gelatin structure.   Eventually, all the kids ended up inside the gummy bear holding sugar molecules, and the bear was now bloated with water molecules!  As a final step, the gummy bear disintegrated and broke apart, something many kids observed from their experiment!

The kids really seemed to enjoy performing and watching the skit, especially with my awesomely dramatic gummy bear acting skills! (hehe) We had a few showings so that all the kids had a chance to be water molecules as well as practice being good audience members.

Activity #2: Gummy Bear Taste Test

Many of the kids practiced self-control last week and refrained from eating their bloated gummy bear.  There were many questions about whether it would taste the same or different from a regular gummy bear.  So, we did a taste test experiment.  The kids first got to try a regular gummy bear and commented on the taste and texture of the bear.  Then, they got to try a water-soaked gummy bear and comment on those.   The kids definitely enjoyed comparing the two types of gummy bear!  A few noticed that the soaked gummy bear tasted like jello, and one child excitedly explained that it was because jello and gummy bears were both made from gelatin!

Activity #3.2: Gummy Bear Guided Exploration

Last week, a couple of kids were asking their own questions about gummy bears and requested time and materials to conduct their own gummy bear experiment.  So, this week, the kids had the opportunity to come up with their own experiment question and follow through the entire scientific method process.  Using a template, the kids were encouraged to record their question statement, their hypothesis, and their results.  We provided a number of tools and options that they could use for their experiment, including ice, colored water, salt, toothpicks/skewers, and various size cups.  The weigh scale and rulers were also available.  The kids also had access to the refrigerator, freezer, and outside (hot environment).

Some of the questions that were posed by the kids included:

• What happens when you put the gummy bear in the freezer?
• What happens when you add ice to the gummy bear?
• What happens when you add sugar to the gummy bear?
• What happens when you put the gummy bear in dirt?
• What happens when you put the gummy bears in fire?
• What happens when you leave the gummy bear out for a long time?
• What happens when you put gummy bears in gak?

A Special Note From Christine (Science Enrichment Coordinator):

“The objective of my science activities this year was to build natural proficiency in using the scientific method (note: this is my personal opinion and mission only).  This is, of course, an ongoing process.  All of the science activities from this past year were organized to help expose and guide the kids through the process of using the scientific method.

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_scientific_method.shtml

This was the kids’ first opportunity to own an experiment independently from start to finish.  There was a wide variety of responses to this activity.  A few really enjoyed coming up with their own unique questions.  Others preferred choosing from options of example questions.  The willingness to provide a hypothesis was mixed, with some kids still hesitant to be considered “wrong”.  This was especially true for problems where the result wasn’t immediately obvious.  All of the kids were able to independently set-up and run their experiment, and most verbally explained their results and observations.

Overall, I think the kids really put on their “scientist” hat and owned it!  It was a great opportunity for me to see areas I might want to focus on for future (1st grade!) activities.

One fun observation: We had a few containers of colored water in case kids wanted to use those for their experiment.  For many of the kids, the colored water turned into its own exploration activity.  Since I only had the primary colors available, a few kids immediately went to work to try to get the secondary colors.  Kids also created “fairy juice” for our visiting fairies, which apparently had to be a specific color that had to be just right for Luna!

Colored water exploration was actually the very first kindergarten science activity back in October, so it was fun to see how much they still enjoyed exploring this!  I guess watching blue water turn green when you add yellow water to it never gets old!”

• Lemonade Stand Starting Tuesday: Coach David has banned younger kids from
  

  Next Week: Raising money for playground hockey pucks, kick balls, soccer balls, basketballs and other equipment!

   using the P.E. balls, as a natural consequence, since they tend to not put them away at the end of recess. So, the kids want to raise money to buy their own playground equipment collection. The other kinder classes were notified of this Friday, during Kinder Sing, and would like to also raise money for a pod-wide ball collection. 

• Child-led Spring Conferences: Click here for the Sign up genius for June!
• End of Year Assessments: I am doing assessments during the day (Quiet Time and Exploration). My hope was that doing it during the day would save you scheduling 2 days to come in with your child, as opposed to 1. 
• Community Snack Schedule:  This week is the Ho/Fukuhara family. Please use the snack signup genius here to sign up for a week to bring snack. Let the Snack Coordinator, Kudsana (kkizaraly@yahoo.com), know if you need special accommodations or are unable to fulfill your commitment. And a BIG thank you to the Steinhauer family for snack last week!
• Silent Auction: Saturday May 13th (adults only) at Shir Hadash in Los Gatos. Christina (art coordinator) helped children make a plushy sensory reading rug, now turned wall art decor and it’s lovely.
• APPLY SUNSCREEN: Please make sure your child is protected and prepared for sunny weather! We have a sunscreen basket under the morning message. Feel free to drop in the kind you like and shoot me an email saying I can use it on your child. Thanks!
• Staff Development Day: NO SCHOOL Friday May 19
• Memorial Day: NO SCHOOL Monday May 29th
• Other FUTURE Parent Meeting Dates: Wednesday May 24th, and Wednesday June 14th.

Fairy House Design Plans!

Weekly Highlights!

Teacher Appreciation Day: Flowers from my kiddos!

• Teacher Appreciation Week: Thank you SO much for all the outpouring of thanks
  

  Thank you for your showering of love and appreciation!

  via notes, drawings, gift cards, and flowers. I’m so sorry!

• Fairies! A fairy door SUDDENLY appeared along with a tiny mail box, and now the
  children are pen pals with Luna the fairy and her family. Having these visitors has inspired children to try their hand at practicing sentences, practicing neat handwriting, more spelling, and writing questions 🙂 It’s really revved up our literacy curriculum…Gotta love those fairies!
• Kinder Sing: We discussed bathroom ettiquette, again, (like not peeing on the toilet paper roll), and fundraising for pod-wide playground equipment.
  

  R2D2 visits for Star Wars Day!

• New Toys and Games: We brought out the foam wood-working set and two games – the Lady Bug Game and the Fairy Game. One is competitive and one is cooperative. Children enjoyed them both!
• Star Wars Day: R2D2 came to visit and many children wore their Star Wars costumes!
• Skill Sharing: We will share every Friday, and Donovan and Pranav shared their skills with us  🙂 Why? Many children have brought in toy items and it became a contest. The items kept getting bigger and newer and created an imbalance in the system of power and social status within our classroom, solelybased on toys being shared. So, we stopped bringing in items and started bringing in SKILLS. Everyone is good at something and this spring is everyone’s time to
  

  Fairy Game: A popular cooperative game amongst all the kids!

  shine! Take a look at the schedule so far!

• Math: We did math conferences. Children were given a base 10 mat with a number shaded in. They had 10 seconds to figure out what number it represented. Then, they could say it and explain their strategy for how they figured it out. The 2 agreements we had were “raise your hand and don’t call out if you know.” Children were very respectful of this! Everyone had a turn, as we used the attendance name
  rocks.
• Buddies: They came to our room! We played parachute outside, and then they
  helped us fill out our self-assessments for the year. It was a really engaging experience to have their buddies walk through this process with them!
• Literacy: We played literacy games, ddid fairy letter writing,
  handwriting, and self-assessments.
• Science: We did experiments with gummy bears on osmosis and heat transfer!
• Just-Right Reading! Each morning, parents can help kids choose leveled books totake home and practice reading with children. Please be sure to return the books and put them in the proper bins!
• Focus Spots: The lack of listening and responding during group times merited spots around the room. Children came to me and asked for a focus spot if they exhausted other strategies. Now, almost everyone has one taped to the floor!

Buddy Time: Parachute & Self-Assessments

Science:  Gummy Bear Osmosis & Heat Transfer!

• Continuing the practice of taking measurements accurately
• Drawing conclusions using quantitative data and qualitative (non-numerical) data
• Introducing the concept of the Control (the variable/object that doesn’t change in an experiment)
• Providing further examples of osmosis/diffusion

Activity #1: Gummy Bear Osmosis

We reminded the kids about last week’s impromptu experiment with adding water to freeze-dried blueberries.  As many of the kids discovered, the “water went into the blueberry and made it squishy.”

This week’s activity builds on the concept of water “going into something” (a.k.a. osmosis) using gummy bears!  The experiment itself was fairly simple on the surface – put a gummy bear in water and wait to see what happens!

Before we started the experiment, we asked the kids their hypothesis on what would happen to their gummy bear in water.  Some of their ideas:

• The gummy bear might sink (or float).
• The gummy bear will grow bigger (or shrink down).
• The water will turn the color of the gummy bear.
• The gummy bear will melt or break into a pieces and disappear.
• The gummy bear will turn a different color.
• The gummy bear will get stickier.

It was interesting to see how the kids’ hypotheses drew from science concepts studied in previous science activities, such as color interaction and density!

Each child got to pick one gummy bear for their experiment.  They used a precision scale to measure the weight and measured their bear against tally marks on a paper to measure the height.  We explained how to make sure our measurements were accurate.  This included checking that the scale was properly tared (reading “0”) before putting their gummy bear on as well as waiting until the final value stabilized.

They recorded these measurements on a data worksheet.  They then added their gummy bear into a cup of water.  Throughout the rest of the day, many of the kids enjoyed looking at their gummy bear and providing observations of changes they saw.

• “The water smells really really good!”
• “The gummy bear is getting bigger!”
• “The water might be turning colors… no, it’s still clear.”
• “The gummy is still sinking.”

The next day, the kids had a chance to remeasure the weight and height of their bears
and record their findings.  Comparing the numbers recorded from the previous day, the kids all came to the same conclusion looking at the quantitative data – their gummy bear was bigger!  Christine then asked the kids to analyze their experiment gummy bear by visually comparing it to a regular gummy bear.  She explained how the regular gummy bear was the Control Gummy Bear in the experiment, the bear that didn’t have any changes done to it.  Of course, observing the two gummy bears side by side, the kids, using qualitative information, all came to the same conclusion – their gummy bear was bigger!

Although a few kids mentioned that it was the water going “inside” the gummy bear that made it bigger, we will talk more about the science behind the growing gummy bear next week!

*** NOTE: Some kids talked about doing this experiment at home.  We made sure to communicate to the kids that gummy bears left out in water overnight should never be eaten.  A few kids really practiced their constraint in not consuming these bears!!

Activity #2: Heat Transfer with Gummy Bears

Even before I had a chance to explain the “official” science activity, a few of the kids had their own questions about gummy bears that they wanted answered.  Specifically, Maddie K wanted to know what would happen if we heated up our gummy bear with the sun.  So, we decided to do an impromptu science experiment!

Each child got a fork and a gummy bear and the chance to go outside to try to heat up their gummy bear.  Most didn’t have the patience to wait outside long with their gummy, and went to the second part of the experiment – tasting it!

A lot of the other kids had experiment ideas they wanted to do, and we’ll be giving all the interested kids a chance to ask their own question, run their own experiment, and draw their own conclusion next week!  This will be the full scientific method in motion!

Skill Teach & Tell Continues!

After Nadia showed the class her skill of doing cat’s cradle with string, Henry’s interest was piqued and he spent a considerable amount of time trying to learn how to do it via online videos.  Henry wanted Nadia to teach him (and the rest of the kids) more about cat’s cradle, and, after consulting with her, she agreed!  So, during Exploration, they passed out loops of yarn to interested kids and Nadia and Henry both spent the time walking
kids through various cat’s cradle configurations.  Once the kids understood the basic concept of moving yarn with their fingers, they discovered that they could create their own designs and configurations.  It was a great way for the kids to share and learn from each other.

Children’s Read-Aloud Schedule

After hearing Ellie Luz read last month, many other children felt inspired to read to the

Cici’s read aloud!

class, too. They begged me to create a sign-up and kept asking when they would read! So, we took time to create this list, below. They chose where on the list they wanted to be (knowing the higher or lower they were meant sooner or later), but please talk with your child about when they’re scheduled to read and whether they’ll be able to prepare their book, in time. This is the list that the kids asked me to put together, because they wanted to read a book to the class themselves. If your child’s goal is to do this, but he/she’s not ready right now, I can definitely have him/her go later! For children who aren’t reading yet but volunteered, too, they could simply do a picture walk (narrating the story orally based on each picture)! The last option is perhaps they can read with a partner, taking turns, or they can read a page and I read a page. The bottom line is that I want them to take as much ownership over this activity as possible 🙂 

What type of book?

Whatever book they want! From BOB books to picture books. It’s their choice of whatever makes them feel comfortable and CONFIDENT.

List of read-aloud dates and students:

1. Ellie  3/23
2. Genevieve 3/24
3. Logan 3/29
4. Dominic 3/30
5. Jada 4/21
6. Claudia 4/27
7. Maddie S./Izzy 5/4 (reschedule?)
8. Nakiya 5/11
9. Pranav 5/12
10. Tyler 5/18
11. Maddie K.  6/1
12. Sthanika 6/2
13. Sadie 6/7
14. Donovan 6/8
15. Quentin 6/9
16. Oscar 6/13
17. Byron 6/14
18. Nadia 6/15
19. Cameron 6/16

Opted Out (for now?)

Henry

Steele

Nicholas

Friday Skill Sharing Schedule (9:15ish-9:50am)

Pranav shared his art!

Children will have an opportunity to explain, demonstrate and field question/comments on ONE (1) skill of their choice. Some have to decide WHICH SKILL because they thought of two. Those children have an (*) next to their name. They have 5-10 minutes each. You can discuss with them how they may want to show their skill, what props they might need, how they will utilize the space of our classroom safely, and help them prepare for this public speaking opportunity by rehearsing it with them. I will prepare the children to be encouraging, kind, and respectful audience members. Some children already told me what they chose as a skill. So that’s why some names already have a skill in parenthesis. If your child has not chosen a skill, yet, please help them choose and prepare before their debut! Please see the following sign-ups, this week’s in bold:

• March 31: Cici (Flexibility), Genevieve (Art)
  

  Donovan shared his hockey skills!

• April 21: Byron (Karate) and Nadia (Cat’s cradle)
• April 28: Tyler (Dance moves), Ellie (Drawing), Maddie K (Gymnastics)
• May 5: Donovan (Hockey), Pranav (Art), 
• May 12:  Dominic (Basketball), Oscar (T-Ball) and Jada (Gymnastics)
• May 26: Logan (?) and Henry (Gymnastics)
• June 2: Cameron (Gymnastics), Sthanika (_________) and , Maddie S. (Gymnastics)
• June 9: Nakiya (Teaching Reading) and Nicholas (_______), Steele (Protecting)
• June 16: Quentin (Running) and Sadie (Dance moves)

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